Need a headline for a flyer? Looking for Friday fun? Amaztype is a fun service from Amazon that lets you search for a word in the title or author’s name of books, music, or videos. Amaztype then spells out the name in books.
I think this could be fun for headlines on websites, flyers, etc. I’m not sure how well these images would print out, but there may be a way to use this for displays of themes or particular authors.
found via A Library By Any Other Name
Well, I decided I needed a challenge for the new year, so here we go.
A new theme is posted each month, and participants choose a book related to the theme. Ideally (and this is the most challenging part for me), we read the book and post a review on our website or blog. So, while I don’t consider myself much of a review writer, I’ll do my best to keep up and post reviews here over the next year.
Anyone else up for the challenge? I’d be happy to have a friend to keep me accountable.
I like the Britannica blog. The Britannica contributors post articles on a range of topics – current events, sports, culture, history, and they are often quite interesting articles to read.
Here is an example of the interesting things this blog includes frequently.
10 Things You (Maybe) Didn’t Know About Books
http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/2007/06/oddments-from-the-world-of-publishing/
WorldCat Lists
http://scanblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/worldcat-lists.html
Alice from the It’s All Good blog reports that WorldCat.org has added a new list-making functionality. She also offers some great suggestions for how to use this feature.
It took me a little while to figure out how to use this. You need a free account to create lists, and it helps if you are already logged in when you run your search. It also helps if you create a list first and then add items to it. Once you create a new list, use the the search box to find items. In your list of search results, you will have a dropdown menu to choose to save it to any list you have created or the Things I Recommend, Things I Own, or Things to Check Out lists that are already created for you.
I did a quick search of other lists (Search > Lists) and found these ideas:
You can also search for people who have created profiles under Search > Contacts.
Anyone have suggestions for how to use this list feature?
2 Models for Digitizing Collections
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/07/google
A large group of universities, the 12 universities that make up the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, has now partnered with Google to digitize their collections.
However, Emory has chosen a different path. This is discussed in the article, but Library Journal provides a little more explanation.
With Scan Plan, Emory University Takes Control
http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6451403.html?nid=2673#news3
I love the idea of print on demand, and I think this is a great application of that idea. (FYI: I used to be employed by Emory University, and I say YAY! for them.)
This is a link to a video of David Weinberger talking about his book _Everything is Miscellaneous_. It’s a hour long, but it’s worth the watch – entertaining and informative. The basic premise of the book is that there is no one best way to categorize the world. Libraries have been forced to do this in the print world, but being forced into one organizational scheme is not required in the digital world.
found via STS-L list
reCAPTCHA
http://recaptcha.net/
So, most of us have had to enter a word from warped text when we sign up for a free newsletter or something else. reCAPTCHA has found a way to use this to help in digitizing books.
The quick, very simple explanation on digitizing books is that you can scan the book and have an image available. In order to make the text searchable, you must do another step using optical character recognitition (OCR) so that all of the text can be read by the system. With older books and odd fonts, the OCR system may have trouble reading all of the characters correctly.
reCAPTCHA helps the system know the correct characters by these words with the warped words to humans so that humans read the text and enter the correct characters for the system to store and add to the text of the book. The human eye is still better at deciphering strange characters than a computer, and reCAPTCHA is taking advantage of that – one word at a time.
Now, that is a crude explanation, but I hope it makes sense. reCAPTCHA has a much prettier explanation on their page.
found via Chronicle: Wired Campus blog
(and Brad Baxter’s post to an internal list at work)
I don’t have a Mac, so I can’t test this (and would be glad if a wonderful Mac person could try it for me!). However, it looks like a great tool for marketing…and it’s just fun.
RSS New Books Screen Saver
http://www.rss4lib.com/2007/05/rss_new_books_screen_saver.html
Now, if someone could just do this for Windows. I wonder if you could download book images from Amazon (or get the images from the books cataloged in LibraryThing if you use that) and then create a slideshow screensaver with all of those images. Hmmm…I’ll have to find time to try this and see if it can be done…
I would personally love to be able to make my desktop image change each morning with a new photo (or book covers would be great, too!). Alas, I have yet to see something that will do this, but I haven’t taken a great deal of time to search for it. Does anyone know how to do this or has anyone heard it can be done?
OK, I got sucked into this site. As soon as I saw it, I felt a compelling need to find a good book to read (but that could be near-graduation mania!).
Scholastic’s Book Central is a fun site for book news, reviews, and book recommendations for kids. Oh, and the rest of the site looks pretty interesting, too!
http://www.scholastic.com/titles/index.htm
Does anyone else have great sites to help kids find books?
Courtney
Learning about Libraries and Technology 